Allawi gets tough

In an effort to restore order, Iraq’s prime minister, Iyad Allawi, has restored the death penalty and ordered a radical Shia cleric to withdraw his fighters from Najaf. Iran stands accused of arming the militants

THERE has been little sign of Iraq's violent insurgencies being quelled since Iyad Allawi's interim government took over at the end of June. Indeed, in the past few days, one of the main insurgent groups—known as the Mahdi Army, and led by Muqtada al-Sadr, a radical Shia Muslim cleric—has detonated a fragile truce and re-engaged in fierce fighting with American forces in Najaf. On Tuesday August 10th, the battle raged on for a sixth day, with American troops and aircraft pounding militiamen dug in around the holy city's shrines and burial grounds, while urging them through loudspeakers to lay down their arms. The Najaf fighting has also reignited unrest in a Shia slum in Baghdad known as “Sadr City”, where a night-time curfew was imposed by the Iraqi authorities on Monday—but widely flouted.

Faced with the deteriorating security situation, Mr Allawi has decided to take a tough line. On Sunday, the prime minister (who is a secular Shia) paid a surprise visit to Najaf, to demand that Mr Sadr's gunmen leave its holy sites. Mr Allawi insisted there would be “no negotiation” with the militia. On the same day, his officials announced the reintroduction of the death penalty, which had been suspended during the American-led occupation of Iraq. There would be an amnesty for insurgents who had committed no serious offences but not for those who had killed. Iraq's re-formed army may be sent into Najaf to help the American troops defeat Mr Sadr's gunmen.

The cleric himself remained defiant, promising to stay in Najaf and fight on “to the last drop of my blood”. The renewed violence in the city has come just as Iraq's most senior Shia cleric, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, has left Najaf to travel to London for medical treatment. Though Mr Sistani has kept his distance from America and its Iraqi allies, he has been regarded as a moderating force among Iraqi Shias and a counterbalance to Mr Sadr's radicalism.

Besides threatening Mr Sadr's fighters, the Iraqi government has been turning up the heat on the Shia theocratic government of neighbouring Iran, which it accuses of arming and encouraging the militia and letting insurgents cross the border. Relations between the two countries have long been poor—they fought a long and brutal war in the 1980s. Since the overthrow of Saddam Hussein's Sunni Muslim regime, Iran has been seeking to build its influence over Iraq's Shia majority.

Iran's president, Muhammad Khatami, has insisted that his country wants to see a stable Iraq, but some in Mr Allawi's government are not convinced. Last week Hazem Shalaan, the defence minister, called Iran the “first enemy” of Iraq; and this week he claimed that Iran was sending weapons to Mr Sadr's fighters. On Tuesday, Iran's foreign minister, Kamal Kharrazi, said he had been reassured by his Iraqi counterpart that the defence minister's comments did not represent official policy. Mr Kharrazi also said his government had invited Mr Allawi to visit Iran, in the hope of defusing the tensions between the two countries.

Another cause of their strained relations is the drama surrounding Ahmed Chalabi, a leading Iraqi politician with strong links to Iran. American officials have accused Mr Chalabi of leaking secrets to the government in Tehran. This week, he claimed American intelligence was behind arrest warrants issued by a senior Iraqi judge against him and his nephew, Salem Chalabi, who is currently the head of the tribunal trying the case against Saddam. The elder Mr Chalabi is accused of counterfeiting money, while his nephew is accused of involvement in the murder of an Iraqi finance-ministry official. Both men, currently out of the country, have denied the accusations.

Before the invasion of Iraq, America had bankrolled the elder Mr Chalabi and his dissident group, despite his conviction in absentia for bank fraud in Jordan in 1992. Shortly after the toppling of Saddam, he was seen as a potential Iraqi leader. But America has since turned on him, partly over the unreliability of the information he provided on Saddam's supposed illegal weapons. Now frozen out of power, he represents a potential threat to Mr Allawi's government, though it is not yet clear if the prime minister has had anything to do with the legal moves against him.

Executions to stop the killings

The tough talk from Mr Allawi, and the restoration of capital punishment, seem to be signs that he fears losing his tenuous grip on the situation in Iraq. Saddam's regime had used the death penalty liberally, and Iraq's new human-rights minister, Bakhtiar Amin, long campaigned against it from exile. European countries, including Britain—America's main ally in the Iraqi invasion—strongly oppose capital punishment. However, Mr Amin justified its reinstatement (which is intended to last only until stability is restored) by arguing that European countries did not abolish the death penalty immediately after the second world war and that Iraq had recently suffered something like a combination of Nazism and Stalinism.

Of course, the threat of execution is not much of a deterrent to the suicide bombers who continue to target Iraqi officials and security forces. On Monday, a suicide car bomb killed seven policemen and wounded 17 other people in a village north of Baghdad. Late last month, Saudi Arabia floated the idea of assembling a Muslim army to help keep the peace in Iraq. But, fearful of being targeted in the same way as other foreigners in Iraq, including even Muslim ones, those countries in a position to send troops have so far proved reluctant to offer them. On Tuesday, Pakistan, which had been seen as among the most likely to send troops, ruled this out for the time being.

Late last month, the dire security situation forced the last-minute postponement of a conference to choose an interim national parliament for Iraq. The conference is now, supposedly, to be held on Saturday. But conditions have hardly improved in the meantime. Even if Mr Sadr were persuaded to order his fighters to pull out of Najaf, not all might obey him. And there are plenty of insurgent flashpoints elsewhere, among the newly disenfranchised Sunni minority as well as the Shia majority. And plenty of frustrated, unemployed young men, and plenty of guns.